Dissonance(s): Jasmine Sierra’s Letters to Ghosts

Mourning can ultimately become a strenuous yet welcome exercise enclosed in one’s way of living — even a political kind of mourning can find its place in one’s wake, as long as it is not strictly limited to melancholy and a constant reminder of the horror of death and its causes. Once mourning is turned into politics, passive modes of existence are left behind in favor of action and radical self-care that finds its roots in one’s community and does not rely exclusively on individualistic endeavors that may as well lay the groundwork for future isolation. Jasmine Sierra’s Letters to Ghosts, a mini-chapbook that blurs the lines between mourning and one’s living and dealing with the death of a loved one, puts poetry to a new purpose, namely to pull any boundaries apart including the ones pertaining to the binary dead/ alive— probably the only binary that is likely to exist in the end.

the passing.

GRANDMOTHER DIED long before i held her name between my
teeth, but i found her old grimoire half-crumpled in the sofa. at midnight,
i try to mimic her writing in saltwater, finger tracing over the
curls & dips of her cursive until all her curses become mine. her blessings,
mine.

i open the cover come the next day and find
the pages blank until i begin to fill it myself.

The result is work that speaks in multiple ways while its language is keeping watch as memory is accessed without any trace of nostalgia. By doing so, Letters to Ghosts disrupts any linear continuity between past and present and bypasses the patterns of common conversation that is supposed to take place only among the living, preferably the human living. Since humans have all been completed underwater, in the amniotic liquid, it’s no surprise that in this mini-chapbook, water, once again, sustains everything that is in the hold and still living — seas, bathtubs, oceans, swimming pools are all here to function as safety nets and splashing memorial walls that witness and also refuse to unsee the violence of one’s death, despite its continuous normalization and eventual naturalization. But, contrary to the life in the amniotic liquid, drowning becomes and remains an unceasing danger, even if adult humans are fiercely 60% water.

i say she many things.
i say she ocean. i say she sea.
she say she don’t care.

water remembers the names of her drowned.
water remembers me.

While gravitating against the suburban safety spawned by gentrification and interchanging gestures and modes of mundane existence depending on new seasons and hair dyes, Jasmine Sierra exposes bits of pulsing intimacy interlaced with apparent discrepancies that may frustrate someone looking for an exercise in logic but appeal to someone who is far more interested in the complicated layers of anything that passes along as “truth”, especially the garden-variety of it. With its bewitching imagery and poignant disharmonies, Letters to Ghosts comes as an uncomfortable inquiry into one’s identity and how this identity can actually have little or nothing to do with auto-determination. But it’s the kind of passionate inquiry that also summons and celebrates queer Blackness as a force for resistance, expression, and ultimately existence in times when this is so badly needed.

mess.

we take no caution to spare us grief from our mess — one bowl of
handpicked strawberries that we lick. that we tease. a little flick of the
tongue until juices hit our taste buds. teeth in next — a nibble, two —
let’s take it slow. red fingertips scrape off leafy heads; we suck ’em clean
with missed gazes. sly grins. center of the fruit’s always thickest after we part our lips and stuff ourselves full.

(solve the riddle, it’s the sweetest in the middle.)

Jasmine Sierra is a jaded witch-bitch who identifies as a polyamorous, queer black writer. She has been featured in Winter Tangerine, Unrooted, Blackberry Magazine, and a number of her local college publications. At present, she is a graduate of Oberlin College based in Ann Arbor, and is taking a small break before returning to school for an MFA in poetry.

Platypus Press is a publisher based in England that seeks to unearth innovative contemporary poetry and prose from a broad variety of voices and experiences. Letters to Ghosts is available for free download here.